More Active Skills - A possibility

First off this is a repost from the Steam forums. Secondly, it's more of a suggestion and if there's a more appropriate subforum than this one I apologise.

Inspired by a lot of calls for more active skills (which I totally understand) here's what I could come up with:

Armor SkillsSimilar to how weapons have 2/4 active abilities attached to them, armor has x (in these examples 3) active skills attached to them instead of one.

Subclasses would get skills that are independent of armor/animations. Some of those already work - like the Turret call-down or the perhaps the temporal field - others would need new class specific abilities. Those would be a part of the Inquisitor - unchangable, not swappable as currently.

Now I'd not saying "Put these in the game". I'm sure the devs could come up with cool combinations. These are just examples to give an idea of how this could work.

The big thing about these, as is hopefully obvious, is that they've also got internal synergy: The abilities of the armor support each other and work well together. But the other important thing is that they are not too specialized - if each armor only works for one playstyle, then there's no choices.

These examples are useable by various Crusader specs.A ranged crusader with a heavy weapon will benefit from the example armors in different ways, but they should all work. Assault by covering up his weaknesses (giving him more mobility and a way out if he gets overrun), Demo by denying his enemies cover and giving him the freedom to gun them down, Leader by just throwing on more damage with extra firepower and self-stim.Just as a melee crusader would benefit from all of them - in different ways. Demo by shoring up his weakspots of ranged blobs, Assault by reinforcing his strengths of getting in and around quickly, Leader by giving him some more ranged firepower support and a nice extra heal/buff.

Essentially, making armor sets into ability sets lets you:A: Give people more active things to do.B: Come up with cool synergistic ability combinationsC: Make Unique/Relic Armors with special ability sets, including perhaps some that appear non-synergistic and allow unusual playstylesD: Make the subclasses actually unique - you only need to come up with 9 non-armor dependent abilities and you've tripled the amount of unique classes!

TL.DR.:Armor works like weapons, gives multiple actives. Lots of upsides. Downside more work for designers and artists.

I like the idea of more choice, and it feed into a bit of feedback I had myself in another area, with one-handed weapons. I'd love to see a UI where your equipped gear made its abilities available to you, and outside of missions you can adjust your skill loadout. You can have 1 armour skill, but 3 to pick from, 4 weapon skills, 2 from each weapon, out of a pool of 8 etc.

Similar to how you can customise your Inoculator, it would be interesting if you could customise your armour and weapon (in the case of dual-wielding weapons that have 4 skills)

Loading down the armors with more abilities makes for more buttons needed to activate these abilities...

But I like the idea of the Melta Charge (as a Focus-based ability) very much, looks like a real nice anti-dreadnought weapon ;-)

True, there would be more buttons needed, but I don't think it'd be a problem. For example, somwthing that'd work, even if you use WASD movement:

WASD Movement

Left-click, right click for weapon 1. Q+E for Weapon 2.

R, reload.

G, grenade.

1,2,3 - Armor abilities 1, 2 and 3

And you've still got Y, X, C, T and V left in easy reach for innoculator and several more actives if necessary.

On a gamepad, you could just make one of the shoulder buttons a modifier to get access to your armor skills on the face buttons. You can play Elite Dangerous on an Xbox pad - we are not going to run out of buttons with Inquisitor Martyr anytime soon.